PHP 8: What WordPress Users Need to Know

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PHP 8.0 is set to be released on November 26, 2020. As the programming language powering WordPress sites, PHP’s latest version offers new features that…

Monday, Nov 23

PHP 8.0 is set to be released on November 26, 2020. As the programming language powering WordPress sites, PHP’s latest version offers new features that developers will find useful and improvements that promise to greatly enhance security and performance in the long run. It also fully removes a number of previously deprecated functions. PHP 8 is a massive change from previous versions.

In this article, we hope to provide insights detailing what this means for WordPress site owners, including recommended adoption strategies.

Should I upgrade right away?

No. The upcoming major version of WordPress, 5.6, is intended to be “beta compatible with PHP 8” according to the November 18 WordPress dev chat. This means that most core WordPress functionality will work, but unexpected bugs may still occur for some time, even without the presence of additional plugins or themes. WordPress has called for additional testing with PHP 8 in order to find and fix as many remaining bugs as possible.

What breaking changes does this include?

Some developers have long argued that PHP is insecure by default. While this is up for debate, it’s true that versions of PHP prior to PHP 8 are more fault tolerant and try very hard to ensure that code will run even if minor errors are present.

PHP 8 uses much stricter typing than previous versions. Many built-in functions are now pickier about the input they accept, and PHP 8 itself is more stringent about how input is passed to functions. Issues that previously resulted in notices now result in warnings, and issues that previously resulted in warnings now result in errors.

Read the complete article published by our partner Wordfence with special thanks to QA Lead Matt Rusnak and Lead Developer Matt Barry for their assistance with this article.

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